Over the past month, they’ve tied for third in the NBA in steals and deflections while ranking 10th in blocked shots, forcing turnovers at the league’s fifth-highest rate. The Pelicans have shown a propensity for applying pressure. And while some of that has been fueled by icy opponent 3-point shooting - just 32.8% from distance for Pels opponents over the past month and just 34% on “open” and “wide-open” attempts - other underlying numbers suggest that their strong defensive play hasn’t been all smoke, mirrors and shooting luck. Since the loss to the Lakers - which, by the way, they avenged on New Year’s Eve - the Pelicans have conceded a scant 107.3 points per 100, making them the league’s stingiest unit over this stretch. That kind of defensive performance has driven New Orleans’ success of late. to 61 points through three quarters before an entire final frame’s worth of garbage time. They’ve balanced that out by toppling the West-leading Timberwolves twice in the past month and are coming off a Sunday dismantling of the Kings in which they led by as many as 50 points, holding De’Aaron Fox, Domantas Sabonis and Co. They’ve had only one bad performance in the past month - a blowout loss to a Clippers team that has been arguably the best in the NBA lately. Three of those four losses came by one possession: a two-point loss to the tougher-than-most-expected Rockets and a pair of defeats at the hands of the Grizzlies, marked by a Ja Morant buzzer-beater in his return from suspension and some late-game referee chaos. (New Orleans ended up blasting Golden State, 141-105.) Indeed, the Pelicans entered Wednesday’s matchup with the Warriors as one of the NBA’s hottest teams - winners of 10 of 14 since the IST debacle and outscoring opponents by 14.5 points per 100 possessions, the league’s best net rating in that span, according to Cleaning the Glass. The silver lining to flaming out in early December, though, is that you’ve got plenty of time to rise from the ashes. Williamson later summed up the experience succinctly: “It sucked.” 1 overall pick nearly 16 years his senior and prompted widespread questions about both whether he was fit to lead New Orleans to playoff success and … well, whether he was fit, period. The sharpest knives came out for Zion Williamson, whose whisper-quiet performance - 13 points on eight shots, three assists, two rebounds - stood in stark contrast to the total control evinced by a fellow former No. And there was plenty of blame to go around after New Orleans got blitzed 81-41 in the second and third quarters of the embarrassing defeat. A 44-point blowout on national television has a way of drawing attention and eliciting condemnation. It’s not that the Pelicans lost to the Lakers but how.
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